Thursday, March 3, 2016

History Rewritten - 4

Red Thunder Cloud was frequently mentioned in local media. He once sued the town of Southampton for $100,000 for "damages to the cultural development of Catawba Indian language" after the town dog warden destroyed nine of his dogs, which he had taught Catawba commands...His successful life-long masquerade puts him in a class with the Englishman who was the Ojibway Grey Owl (1886-1936) and the African American who was the Blackfoot Buffalo Child Long Lance (d. 1932), both the subjects of films. But Red Thunder Cloud's accomplishment in becoming a speaker of Catawba puts him outside the class of ordinary impostors...- April 2000 report on "the last speaker" of Catawba language

When I
started looking into the decline and extinction of native languages of theSoutheast I did not expect to encounter a candidate for the Hoaxster Hall of
Fame.

One of the
all-time great hoaxes has to be the Yes Men, posing as Dow Chemical spokesmen,
making it onto the BBC News to apologize for the Bhopal disaster and announce a
settlement to the victims. The ruse was
promptly exposed, but not before Dow Chemical stocks tumbled, and actual Dow officials
took the air to disavow any apology or settlement. Brilliant.

Another
prior inductee in the HHOF is Alan Abel, maybe the greatest media hoaxster of
all time.

And Abel planted a number of "fainters" in the studio audience of Phil Donahue's show, creating quite a stir:

I'm not sure "hoax" is the word for Forrest Carter, author of the beloved memoir, The Education of Little Tree: A True Story. The continuing affection for this book,
telling of the young Carter’s introduction to his Cherokee heritage while raised by
his grandparents, is phenomenal. Few
books published in the past 40 years have been so venerated.

Even now,
the Amazon reviews for the book are testimonials of the sort you seldom
see, almost worshipful. Surprisingly infrequent are
comments regarding the fictional nature of the work, or the fact that Forrest
Carter was also Asa Carter, segregationist mastermind. His story is told in the remarkable
documentary, The Reconstruction of Asa
Carter.

It is
worth watching just to see jaws hit the floor when close friends of Forrest are
exposed, for the first time, to films of Asa in his prime. They are utterly dumbfounded. Asa Carter was credited with writing the famous
“Segregation now, segregation forever” speech by George Wallace.

Carter
decided Wallace wasn't racist enough in 1968 and sought office
himself to more effectively push his own agenda:

Eventually,
inexplicably, he ceased to be Asa and reinvented himself as Forrest, writing the The Rebel Outlaw: Josie Wales, which was adapted
into a classic Clint Eastwood film. Likewise, The Education of Little Tree (1976) was
adapted for the screen.

The Great New Age
High Priestess Oprah oohed and ahhed over Little Tree when she recommended the book in 1994, but backed off
as soon as she learned about Asa:

I no longer—even
though I had been moved by the story—felt the same about this book. There's a part of me that said, “Well, OK, if
a person has two sides of them and can write this wonderful story and also
write the segregation forever speech, maybe that's OK.” But I couldn't—I couldn't live with that.

It's one thing to struggle with the "true identity" of a work's creator, but what about the truth of a work itself?

The
question arises – does our cultural heritage emerge from what happened? Or is our cultural heritage composed of what
we imagined to have happened? Is one
more authentic or more legitimate than the other? By the same token, is the Unto These
Hills comic-book version of Cherokee culture something to be
corrected or to be celebrated?

Questions
like these started swirling after I considered the case of Red Thunder Cloud, of the Catawba Nation. But before Red takes his turn in the
spotlight, let’s dip into Deep Waters:
The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature. Author Christopher Teuton tells of a July
evening spent in Tahlequah, Oklahoma listening to stories from Cherokee
traditionalists Sequoyah Guess and Sam Still:

A sixth-generation direct
descendant of his namesake, Sequoyah Guess knows well the differences between
the written history of Sequoyah’s work and the oral stories that recount his
accomplishments….

Sequoyah, whose English name was
George Guess, is thought to be the only person in human history to have created
a written language from scratch, albeit through “idea diffusion.” Although he
was illiterate, Sequoyah saw the value in writing and created his “talking
leaves,” a system that culminated in the eighty-five signs of the Cherokee
syllabary….

Sequoyah was asked “why and how he
invented the alphabet,” to which he replied that “he had observed, that many
things were found out by men, and known in the world, but that this knowledge
escaped and was lost, for want of some way to preserve it. He had observed white people write things on
paper, and he had seen books; and he knew that what was written down remained
and was not forgotten.”… Sequoyah saw
his people’s need to record their knowledge in writing and so he created the
system.

By the light of the fire Sequoyah
Guess explains the contrasts between the Sequoyah of record and the man his
family recalls. The first Sequoyah’s
father, a man named Guess, was not English but a Cherokee…. The syllabary
project took him nearly twenty years to complete, not twelve, as scholars
commonly claim….Most important, Sequoyah did not create or invent the Cherokee
syllabary. His family claims that he developed
the syllabary from a much older language, one used by an ancient priesthood
called the Ani-Kutani….

Since the civil war with [and
destruction of] the Ani-Kutani, Cherokee culture has carried deep within it an
anxiety regarding the means of communication that was the guarantor of [the
Ani-Kutani’s] authority, the source of their knowledge, and the impetus for
their arrogance: writing….

The story of [pre-contact] Cherokee
writing is bound to face skepticism, if not outright dismissal, the lack of
corroborating documentary evidence makes it apocryphal. However, Cherokees have been telling this
story for a long time, and it gains its authority and meaning within a Cherokee
cultural context.

Teuton
explains how he approaches this story of Sequoyah, the Ani-Kutani and Cherokee
writing:

I want to imagine what this story
means from a Cherokee cultural perspective…. Considering oral traditional
stories allows me to reinterpret the historical record, coming to new
conclusions regarding the ways knowledge was encouraged to exist in Cherokee
society….

Through their use of writing
Euro-Americans had become, symbolically, the successors of the Ani-Kutani. For the Cherokee to maintain control over
their own cultural knowledge it was necessary to reestablish a form of their
own writing….

From first contact European
writings have been used as a form of control to colonize, proselytize, and
subjugate Native America. The study of
oppressive uses of writing in the form of treaties and laws is a part of the intellectual
foundation of Native American studies, and the critique of the argument that
writing establishes authority while the oral tradition is ephemeral has been
well established.

Fascinating
stuff. Does this help to reconcile the
gaps between the legend of Tsali (selfless martyr who sacrificed his life so the
Cherokees could remain in the mountains) versus the relatively thorough
documentary record that describes him as a murderer who had thrown a
monkey-wrench into the plans of a Cherokee remnant that had worked out a shaky
agreement to remain in the mountains?
History, but not the popular legend, suggests that Tsali was hunted down and
shot by Cherokees who sought to eliminate the threat that he posed to their
retention of a homeland in North Carolina.

Is one
more legitimate than the other? Does the
telling of the story create the story?
Do apocryphal tales transmit truths otherwise lost by conventional
historic methods, but essential to understanding a culture?

Living
near the marketing epicenters of “authentic Cherokee culture” and “authentic
Appalachian culture” as long as I have, I've acquired a bias. We've had enough of the same "legends" repeated ad nauseum, enough of the hucksters hawking them, enough of the customers for phony heritage tripe.

A couple
of years ago, one show that will remain unnamed shot a program on Judaculla Rock.
It was the overblown, conspiracy-theory, pseudo-scientific “investigation” one
would expect and even cast an “authentic Appalachian guide,” who happened to be some dude that showed up in Bryson City a few years ago, grew out his beard, put on a
rustic costume and adopted poor grammar to market himself as a Gen-yew-wine
Hillbilly or something like that.

He couldn’t turn the water into wine, but he sure could turn it into likker…

Popcorn Sutton was a saint and a martyr…

Over and
over, its the same dilemma:

Marvin or
Popcorn?

Forrest or
Asa?

Sequoyah
or George Guess?

Tsali the
fugitive murderer or Tsali the sacrificial lamb?

Red
Thunder Cloud or Carlos Westez?

On the
other hand, I appreciate the point of view explained by Christopher
Teuton. And the more I consider the twentieth
century “Catawban” Red Thunder Cloud, the more I wonder if “Catawban” should be
in quotes or not. His life is the one of
the most perplexing case studies I have seen over what constitutes genuine
cultural identity. And understanding cultural identity is essential to figuring out what happened in the mountains between, say, 1492 and 1776.

With
little further comment beyond that, let’s meet Red Thunder Cloud. First, his obituary from the New York Times, January 14, 1996:

Red Thunder Cloud, a member of the
Catawba Nation who was steeped in the history of the American Indians, died
Monday in Worcester, Mass. He was the last human link to the ancient language
of his people.

Thunder Cloud, who was 76, died in St. Vincent's Hospital after a stroke,
friends said Thunder Cloud was also known as Carlos Westez and lived in
Northbridge, Mass. He was a storyteller and earned money from selling his own
line of teas from herbs that he collected in the woods around his home.

"It's always sad when the last living speaker of a language dies,"
Carl Teeter, emeritus professor of linguistics at Harvard University, said on
Friday. "There were once 500 languages in North America. About a hundred
are still spoken, and half of them are spoken by older people." Dr. Teeter
said the Catawba language, like others, had died off because of prejudice. Not
so long ago, he said, Americans who spoke Indian languages "weren't
treated too well."

Dr. Teeter described Catawba, an oral language with no written form, as related
to the Sioux family of languages. He said the similarity indicated that there
may have been considerable movement among Indian tribes hundreds of years ago.

In the 1940's, Thunder Cloud made a complete recording of all he knew of the
Catawba language for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About that
time, he also recorded some ancient Catawba songs for the Smithsonian
Institution. Derek Jordan of Putney, Vt., a friend of Thunder Cloud's, recorded
two albums of Catawba songs and legends by Thunder Cloud in 1990.

Mr. Jordan said Thunder Cloud had learned Catawba as a boy from his
grandfather, Strong Eagle, and from tribal elders. Eventually, there were only
two Catawba speakers left: Thunder Cloud and a woman, who died about 40 years
ago.

Foxx Ayers of Columbia, S.C., a Catawba and friend of Thunder Cloud, recalled
on Friday that he resisted his grandmother's efforts to teach him the language
because he feared he would be ridiculed. "I wish now that I'd
learned," said. Ayers, 71.

Mr. Ayers recalled one happy experiment with the language. One day years ago,
he was visiting Thunder Cloud, who used to sell pottery made by Mr. Ayer's
wife, Sarah, who is also a Catawba. Mr. Ayers's arms were full of pottery when
he found his way blocked by Thunder Cloud's dog. The dog responded only to
commands in Catawba. So Ayers tried one phrase he had heard Thunder Cloud use
(roughly "Swie hay, tanty," or "Move, dog"), and the dog
obeyed.

Alice Kasakoff, a professor of anthropology at the University of South
Carolina, said the conversion of many Catawbas after visits by Mormon
missionaries to their enclave in South Carolina may have hastened the decline
of the Indian language.

Estimates of the number of living Catabaws range from several hundred to more
than 1,000. The nation's headquarters is in Rock Hill, S.C.

In its scarcity of close relationships, Thunder Cloud's life seemed to
foreshadow the passing of the language only he spoke. Mr. Ayers said he
recalled that Thunder Cloud was married for a time to a Blackfeet woman, but that
the union dissolved.

Lenora Pena of Center Falls, R.I., who described herself as Thunder Cloud's
closest friend, said he prayed each night in Catawba.

Thunder Cloud left no known survivors. Ms. Pena said that Thunder Cloud had a
sister but that they had lost track of each other many years ago.

Via the
Smithsonian Institution, more about his complicated life:

Red Thunder Cloud, whose death on
January 8, 1996, was widely noted as also being the death of the Catawba
language, was one of the most colorful and enigmatic figures in American Indian
linguistics in the twentieth century. His claim that he was a Catawba and a
native speaker of the language, doubted by some and defended by others, can now
be definitively evaluated. But while enough information is now available to
give a good picture of who he was and where he came from, his life and his work
still raise challenging and fascinating question.Red Thunder Cloud introduced himself
to Frank G. Speck, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania,
in a letter of May 14, 1938. He states that he is "a 16 year old Catawba
Indian and a Junior at Southampton High School" on Long Island.1 He
guesses that he was a "little fellow" when Speck visited the Catawbas
(whose reservation was in Rock Hill, South Carolina), but says that "as a
very young boy I was brought up among the Narragansett Indians of Rhode Island.
I have only been living with the Shinnecocks since July 27, 1937." He says
that he has studied American Indians since he was in the fourth grade and has
visited many eastern groups, including several in Virginia, "though I was
a tot when I visited some of them." He reports plans to leave in August
"for my home down on the Catawba Reservation" in South Carolina, and
then to travel to Haskell Indian Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. He mentions the
interest of Shinnecock Indians on Long Island in learning about their language
and his desire to help them in this, referring to a letter from Speck to a
Shinnecock named Running Eagle replying to inquiries on this subject. He says
that he intends to obtain a copy of Gatschet's Catawba sketch and inquires
about the price of a "vocabulary" that he understands Speck has
published.2
"Fortunately for us the Catawbas our language is not entirely lost.
Besides the lady you mentioned in your letter [sc. to Running Eagle] I think that there are two others of our
tribe who still speak the language down to Catawba." He makes no claim
that he knows any Catawba and does not refer to any member of his family. He
signs himself "Chief Red Thunder Cloud."When Frank T. Siebert, Jr., was doing
fieldwork on Catawba in April, 1941, a local schoolteacher told him of
receiving correspondence from Red Thunder Cloud, who claimed to know the
language. A month later Siebert met him at the Gramercy Boys' Club in New York.
Siebert often recalled his surprise on being approached by what appeared to be
a young black man wrapped Indian-style in a blanket. In two or three hours of
elicitation he obtained a couple of dozen Catawba words and somewhat fewer numbers,
covering slightly more than three pages of a small exam book. His recollection
years later was that Red Thunder Cloud knew considerably more than this,
"between 100 and 250 words, ... numeral count up to ten, and occasional
short expressions." Red Thunder Cloud also told him two traditions, one of
tying buffalo hoofs to the feet to lure enemies into an ambush, and one of
using rattlesnake venom on pine needles as booby traps. He said he had learned
Catawba from his grandmother, Ada McMechen (Blue Moccasin), who had died about
1924. Siebert thought that he might have remembered some Catawba from his
grandmother but had supplemented his recollections from published materials. He
considered a Catawba-speaking black grandmother possible, since Sally Brown
Gordon had reported once meeting in a market in Charlotte, North Carolina, a
black woman who spoke good Catawba. But Siebert recognized the two war
practices Red Thunder Cloud described as the same ones attributed to the
Catawbas of the 1750's in James Smith's captivity narrative.3Beginning in 1938, Red Thunder Cloud
worked for Speck on small projects collecting ethnographic data and folklore
among Long Island Indians, and he received from him some training in
"field methods of recording notes etc." He also collected among the
Montauk, Shinnecock, and Mashpee for George G. Heye (Museum of the American
Indian) and for the American Museum of Natural History.4
During this period he also published several papers on Long Island ethnography
and folklore, and he amassed a large collection of photographs of Long Island
Indians.5
In December, 1943, he spent two weeks at Penn "furnishing information
about the ... language of the Catawba tribe," recording songs, and aiding
in ethnobotanical research. A statement that he "assisted Speck in
informant courses" at Penn implies additional informant work, which a vita
he prepared in 1973 refers to as "dictat[ing] ... Catawba Texts to
Anthropology Classes," but Speck seems never to have published any
linguistic data from him.6
Also in 1943, he told Speck the tradition regarding the use of rattlesnake
venom, crediting it to his grandmother Ada McMechen, who had "learned it
from her grandmother, Mildred Harris, a woman who died sometime before 1900 at
the age of 99. Both women were of Catawba descent."7With a letter of introduction from
Speck, Red Thunder Cloud made his first visit to the Catawbas, for about two
weeks, in February, 1944. Later, most likely in 1945, he spent about six months
studying the language intensively with Sam Blue and Sally Gordon, as recalled
by Sam Blue's grandson, Chief Gilbert Blue. In defending Red Thunder Cloud's
reliability as a fieldworker in 1946, Speck stated that "he speaks Catawba,
as we know for a certainty."8
When interviewed in 1957 by William C. Sturtevant (then of the Bureau of
American Ethnology and now of the Dept. of Anthropology, Smithsonian
Institution), Sam Blue and his daughter-in-law Lillian said that they doubted
Red Thunder Cloud was an Indian. Sam Blue thought that he had learned the few
words of Catawba that he knew from Speck's books. In a letter to Speck written
after his return, Red Thunder Cloud defended himself against this suspicion.9Red Thunder Cloud introduced himself
to Sturtevant in a 1958 letter offering aid in contacting eastern Indian groups
and survivors, including three speakers of Wampanoag: "My mother is a
Catawba Indian and my father a native of Tegucigalpa, Honduras of Honduran and
Puerto Rican parentage. I speak Catawba, Spanish and Pourtegeese and am able to
find myself in Cayuga, Seneca, Mohawk, Narragansett, Micmac, Passamaquoddy,
Penobscot, Creek and have some smattering of Choctaw, Sioux, Winnebago in
addition to being able to recognize some of the other Indian languages when I
hear them spoken."10In 1964 and 1965 Red Thunder Cloud
worked with G. Hubert Matthews, then at MIT, to document the Catawba language.
Their 1967 publication of five texts (two dated to February, 1944) included
information on Red Thunder Cloud's family history and a genealogy that
indicates which relatives (all on his mother's side) were Catawbas and which of
these spoke Catawba. His full name is given as Carlos Ashibie Hawk Westez. His
father is Carlos Panchito Westez, and his mother is Roberta Hawk. His father's
parents are Teodoro Sanchez (from Honduras) and Feliciana Mendoza (from Puerto
Rico), and his mother's parents are William Ashibie Hawk (a Catawba speaker,
son of Robert Hawk and Susan Scott Cobbs) and Ada McMechen (not a speaker,
daughter of George McMechen and Mildred Harris). Earlier generations on his
mother's side are also given. In defending the authenticity of Red Thunder
Cloud's Catawba to C.F. Voegelin, the editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics, Matthews referred
to the genealogy as one that Sam Blue and Red Thunder Cloud "were able to
work out" and which "linked him with Catawba that Chief Blue
knew." Red Thunder Cloud specifically claimed that he had learned Catawba
from his mother's father, also called Strong Eagle, a lawyer who graduated from
Yale Law School and died in 1941. He gave his mother's Indian name as Singing
Dove.11Red Thunder Cloud was frequently
mentioned in local media. He once sued the town of Southampton for $100,000 for
"damages to the cultural development of Catawba Indian language"
after the town dog warden destroyed nine of his dogs, which he had taught
Catawba commands. Some of his activities, with further references, are
described in the obituary and the note on media reports by Victor Golla in SSILA Newsletter 15.1:2, 4-5 (1996).
He was a familiar figure at local fairs in New England, selling a line of
herbal medicines under the name "Red Thunder Cloud's Accabonac Princess
American Indian Teas" ("fresh from the American forest to you").
He also reported that he had "rescued some Montauk vocabulary from
oblivion," and sometimes claimed to speak Montauk.12 He
was married for a time to Jean Marilyn Miller (Pretty Pony), said to be a
Blackfeet, who appeared with him at powwows and other presentations.On his death certificate, based on
information provided by his friend Leonor Peña of Central Falls, R.I., his name
is given as Carlos Westez (with aliases Red Thunder Cloud and Namo S. Hatirire)
and his occupation as "Shaman." He is described as having been born
in Newport, R.I., May 30, 1919, the son of Cromwell West and Roberta (Hawk)
West. In the subsequent probate documents, his sister, a retired member of the
faculty of the University of Maryland at Baltimore, appears as administrator,
and his name is given as Ashbie Hawkins West, the name under which he had been
enrolled in high school (with a recorded birth date of May 30, 1922) in the
year he wrote to Speck and by which he was first known to the Shinnecocks.13In fact, his full name at birth was Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West. He was
enumerated as Cromwell A. West in the 1920 census and used the name Cromwell
West when he was employed at the Newport City Wharf, 1935-1937, as a watchman
and later a chauffeur. His father was Cromwell Payne West, a drugstore
proprietor in Newport 1917-1937, who is listed in the 1900 and 1920 censuses as
a black man born in Pennsylvania in 1891. By 1894 his father's father, Theodore
D. West (born in Virginia), and his father's mother, Elizabeth R. West (born in
Pennsylvania), had moved with his father to Newport, where his grandfather
worked as a barber (or "hairdresser").14
From about 1929 to 1933 Roberta West was not listed as being in Newport, and
Leonor Peña believes that during this time she lived with her children in North
Carolina, near the Catawba Reservation.15The name Carlos Ashibie Hawk Westez is
a transparent modification of the name Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West, given that
the father's name in the 1967 genealogy is Carlos Panchito Westez instead of
Cromwell Payne West. If everywhere in this genealogy Ashibie is changed to
Ashbie, Hawk to Hawkins, and Westez to West, it becomes on the mother's side the
genealogy of Roberta West, who was born Roberta M. Hawkins in Baltimore in
1891. (She also used the names Roberta M.B. West and Roberta C. West.) Roberta
Hawkins' father was William Ashbie Hawkins (1862-1941; LL.B. Howard Law School,
1892), one of the first black lawyers in Baltimore and a prominent civic
leader, born the son of the Rev. Robert Hawkins and Susan (Cobb) Hawkins in
Lynchburg, Va. Her mother was born Ada M. McMechen (/mkmékn/),
the daughter of George H. and Mildred McMechen of Wheeling, W. Va. George H.
McMechen's occupation is given as "plasterer" and
"mechanic." Ada McMechen Hawkins' younger brother, George William
Frederick McMechen (1871-1961; B.A. Morgan College, 1895; LL.B. Yale Law
School, 1897), Ashbie Hawkins' law partner, was another prominent member of
Baltimore's black community; the business and economics building at Morgan
State University in Baltimore is named for him.16Red Thunder Cloud also mentioned that
he had a cousin Gerald Brown (Running Beaver; d. 1952) who spoke Catawba, the
son of his mother's sister, Hazel Hawk, and William Brown. Roberta West had a
sister Aldina Haynes (d. 1940), who briefly lived in Newport under the name
Aldina H. Brown in the 1930's, but W. Ashbie Hawkins' 1941 obituary mentions
only two grandchildren, who were presumably Red Thunder Cloud and his sister.17Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West's life as
Red Thunder Cloud confronts us with basic questions of race and identity that
are emblematic of our age.18
His successful life-long masquerade puts him in a class with the Englishman who
was the Ojibway Grey Owl (1886-1936) and the African American who was the
Blackfoot Buffalo Child Long Lance (d. 1932), both the subjects of films. But
Red Thunder Cloud's accomplishment in becoming a speaker of Catawba puts him
outside the class of ordinary impostors, and the not insignificant work he did
on Catawba leaves us as linguists with challenging problems of interpretation
and evaluation.